The relationship between RD spending and shareholder returnsin the computer industry

摘要

This paper explores the relationship between corporate R&Dspending and growth in stockholder value. Corporate R&D, at themacroeconomic level, amounts to controllable, discriminate, electivespending with the management intent of creating future revenue andprofit opportunities for the firm. It is firmly established thatdifferent industries tend to have different levels of R&Dinvestments as a percentage of revenue. Researchers have used R&Dexpenditures and their various measurable effects as proxies forinventive output in attempts to correlate current R&D efforts tofuture results of the firms within an industry. Other studies havesignificantly related announced increases in firm R&D expendituresto positive, short term share price response. However, less research isavailable that relates R&D spending to the firms' actual futurereturns to shareholders. In this study, R&D as a percent of revenueat the firm level within the computer industry is correlated to thereturn to shareholders in later years. The years 1992-1994 are used toset the firms' routine R&D spending levels as a percent of revenues.Stockholder returns by firm are calculated over the years 1993-1997 andare compared to the firms' R&D spending levels in the previousyears. The computer industry was chosen for this study because of itsfast paced rate of technology change. The results indicate that there isa statistically significant negative relationship between routineR&D spending intensity and the actual stockholder returnsexperienced in succeeding years